Insights & Examples

We are a leadership consultancy

We develop leaders to transform their business model, grow a culture of innovation, create breakthrough performance through people and teams, and to maximise their personal impact.

Our difference

For almost 40 years we have pioneered a way of thinking about solving performance challenges called Fusion. Fusion is our consulting ethos and a series of thinking tools that we use to help leaders integrate capacity (an individual’s inner world) and capability (the outer world). The result is cohesive, innovative thinking and solutions that solve fundamental business problems.

Jean Gomes, CEO of DPA

Talks about Our FusionConsulting Ethos

Performance Redefined

The pressure to change, coupled with an unconsciously limited mindset, has generated the Value Bias that rules many organisations. The results range from immediacy addiction, with employees hooked on short-term activity and inside-out cultures where the customer is last in the chain of real considerations, to strategic vulnerability where long-term relevancy is continually short-changed. Many of the major performance problems we discuss with leaders are deeply rooted in a Value Bias.

Our insight, honed over 40 years of research and practice, is that breaking past what has become the ultimate performance dilemma – value today versus value tomorrow – requires a new lens through which leaders can view the world and discover the next frontier of organisational and individual performance gains.

We call this idea Fusion.

Value Bias

Many leaders concede that the basics of their organisation, from business model through to mindset, seem to be constantly one step behind.

Never enough time to think, leaders and their teams are almost wholly reactive. Hitting ever shorter-term goals and defending the status quo has become the miracle that must be performed on a perpetual basis.

Is it simply that rising market forces have created this cauldron of pressure? Or is it the way we think about performance that’s the central part of the problem?

The Value Bias.

In an analysis of 290 corporate performance research studies, the biggest factor in the difference between high and low performance organisations was the greater long-term focus of the high performing companies (source: Macrothink Institute)

The simplest way to describe how an organisation creates values is through the lens of focus – what individuals, teams and divisions are absorbed in doing. This is the fundamental challenge for leaders.

There are three immutable dimensions of organisational focus: Value today is exploiting the existing business model for short-term return; Value tomorrow is about innovation and investment in the future; Aligning People and Value is the leadership and management challenges of setting the balance for this focus and aligning resources accordingly.

Fusion – The Ultimate Performance State

We describe Fusion as an organisation’s faculty to integrate its two forms of ability – capability and capacity – to create the ultimate performance state.

Adaptive Performance is driven by the best of the organisation’s rational and creative dimensions, as it holds an optimal balance between the needs of today and the future. It dynamically blends the rational and creative intelligences of the organisation, whilst remaining alert to the environment.

Fusion Thinking is a new way in which leaders can solve the big performance challenges facing their teams and organisations. At its heart is a way of thinking that involves moving past an either/or mindset to both/and problem solving.

Challenges And Problems We Solve

Problem solving for our clients is at the heart of what we do. Our diverse team is never happier than sitting around the table with a new client brief, working out how best to solve it, and how to design something tailor-made to get the best result.

The Value Bias
The root cause of business challenges we most often see

The Ultimate Performance State –DPA And Elite Sport

For the last 15 years, DPA has worked as a trusted advisor to some of the most successful leaders in elite sport, to test our research and thinking in the ultimate performance environments.

The story for DPA started when we worked with Larry Scott, then CEO and Chairman of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), to help facilitate a historic deal to achieve parity with men’s prize money at Wimbledon and the French Open, which led to equality at all Grand Slam events. Prize money for the women’s game increased by 40% during Scott’s time with the WTA.

Jean Gomes gave the keynote at the World Class Performance Conference to 400 performance leaders in the British Olympic system in the countdown to the Rio Olympics. DPA subsequently created a ‘performance landscape’ framework to help Performance Directors think and plan systemically to drive ever greater performance. Since then, we have worked with the Performance Directorate of UK Sport who are responsible for medal results, on their purpose and teamwork. In tandem we have worked with many of the Performance Directors in the Olympic system on their leadership development.

Most recently we facilitated the de-brief of lessons learnt from Team GB’s performance at the Rio Olympics where Britain finished 2nd – an unprecedented achievement being the first host nation to improve its medal tally in a subsequent Olympics.